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		<title>More garbage assignments &lt;https://y.st./en/weblog/2017/10-October/19.xhtml&gt;</title>
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		<header>
			<h1>More garbage assignments</h1>
			<p>Day 00957: <time>Thursday, 2017 October 19</time></p>
		</header>
<section id="general">
	<h2>General news</h2>
	<p>
		A company that keeps sending me postal spam sent me another junk mail letter today.
		I think my credit union sold them my name and address.
		They keep trying to get me to telephone them.
		Normally I ignore it, but this time, they had an offer I was slightly interested in.
		I emailed them explaining that I don&apos;t have telephone service and asking how to claim the offer.
		They wrote back telling me to call some telephone number.
		<strong>*Clearly*</strong>, they didn&apos;t actually <strong>*read*</strong> my message to them.
		I wrote back saying as much too.
		If they write back saying I can&apos;t claim the offer now, I&apos;m probably going to look into my legal rights in regards to spam sent by companies that one has asked to stop contacting them, then I&apos;ll ask them to stop contacting me.
		I may or may not bring up the legal rights in that message, though if I don&apos;t and they claim they can&apos;t remove me from their list, I&apos;ll certainly cite my rights.
		If they can&apos;t be bothered to put in the effort to make themselves available via a reasonable contact method, then they&apos;re going to <strong>*have to*</strong> put in the effort to make sure not to keep adding me to their contact list when they get member list updates from my credit union.
	</p>
</section>
<section id="university">
	<h2>University life</h2>
	<p>
		Lovely.
		I&apos;ve got another bad school week ahead of me.
		In <span title="Operating Systems 1">CS 2301</span>, we&apos;ve got another Windows-only assignment.
		Again, with no warning.
		I&apos;ve asked Mostapha for for help again, so hopefully that&apos;ll be a somewhat quick assignment.
		Still, I&apos;ve got to do double the work, as I&apos;ve got to show the Windows tool required, in addition to some Linux equivalent to show that Windows doesn&apos;t have some leg up on Linux that it doesn&apos;t actually have.
		Mostapha said he&apos;d help, but he didn&apos;t actually start up the virtualised system.
		I think he assumed the request was for later for some reason.
		If he hasn&apos;t gotten back to me on that by my next day off, I&apos;ll try to get him to start the system then.
		That way, I have all day to try to reach him when he&apos;s home and not busy.
		In <span title="Web Programming 1">CS 2205</span>, we&apos;ve had a few confusing assignments lately.
		The problem is that the assignments tell us to complete certain activities on a third-party website that has changed quite a bit since the assignments were written.
		This week, the assignment tells us to complete some of the <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> lessons on this website.
		However, while other lessons have appeared to be renamed, restructured, and/or replaced, there appeared to no longer be any <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> lessons on the website at all; it seemed they&apos;d been completely <strong>*removed*</strong>!
		I thought there was no possibility of completing anything close to the original assignment.
	</p>
	<p>
		I wrote to the professor on the side, and pasted the same message in the public class forum.
		A couple other students showed me the <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> section of the site though.
		Um.
		How did they <strong>*find*</strong> that?
		I can&apos;t find any link to that page on the actual website; I need to know the actual <abbr title="Uniform Resource Identifier">URI</abbr> to get there.
		Furthermore, the completion of work in this hidden section doesn&apos;t show up on my profile page.
		It this ... an old part of the site that never got updated?
		Is it just here as cruft, somewhat-functional, but abandoned and forgotten?
		Other students have been using lessons from this broken section too though.
		I recognise the section from their screenshots, though there doesn&apos;t seem to be a way to navigate between lesson topics.
		Furthermore, students using this section always only had the lessons show up as one percent complete in their screenshots.
		Now I see why.
		When the lessons here have not been completed, they show up as being 0% complete, regardless of the actual completion percentage.
		Once you complete them, they show up as 1% complete, not 100% complete.
		That only backs up my theory that this section of the site is broken and abandoned; if it was maintained, this would probably have been caught and fixed.
		A little editing of the page cleaned up the screenshot, and I actually took the screenshot before completing all of the work.
		I did go back and complete the work though, despite it all being way below my skill level.
		I mean, it&apos;s an introduction to <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> and <abbr title="PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor">PHP</abbr> is my native language.
		Later in the day, my professor got to me, and they&apos;ve been confused about the assignments too.
		They&apos;re speaking with the course planners to see what&apos;s going on.
		It&apos;s a simple matter of that the website was updated since the assignments were written though.
		The assignments simply need to be updated to reflect that.
		It&apos;s a risk you take when you rely on third-party systems.
		More importantly to me though, this professor, my <span title="Web Programming 1">CS 2205</span> professor, got back to me same-day.
		This proves that unlike my <span title="Operating Systems 1">CS 2301</span> professor, who didn&apos;t get back to me even after a week had passed, my <span title="Web Programming 1">CS 2205</span> can be depended upon.
	</p>
	<p>
		I also got the grading for the week done, and a little of one of the reading assignments.
		I should&apos;ve worked harder and gotten more of the reading done, but failing to go full force in my studies worked out for me last week.
		In part, I think it keeps me from burning out completely before I reach the finish line, but also, when things events don&apos;t seem to be conspiring to bring me down, I do have some time to spare.
	</p>
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